Gillespie County, Texas had around 8,000 ballots cast in the March 5th Republican primary, and they just couldn’t handle it.  Struck with suspicion of electronic voting machines thanks to baseless fears stoked by Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and various other conspiracists, county officials decided to hand-count all the ballots in this year’s elections.  As described by the Texas Tribune, it did not go well.

An hour after finally certifying the results of fourteen contested races and thirteen propositions earlier Thursday, Republican Party Chair Bruce Campbell had to call the county election commissioner to come back to recertify the results because he spotted an error in the final results.  And note that this correction happened more than two weeks after the primary was held, not on the night of the election like Trump wanted during the 2020 campaign.

A member of local Tea Party group–yeah, there’s still out there–was exceptionally cheery about the errors he made when he counted ballots, according to a video posted to Mike Lindell’s Frank Social platform–yeah, it’s still out there.

“So there were two ballots, and I just didn’t add them up. So I would have had to add 450 and two, and it would have been 452 and I didn’t. I just forgot to fill it in,” Fredericksburg Tea Party member David Treibs said. “So I don’t really think that’s something that’s going to shut down the election and it’s like, ‘oh my gosh, he didn’t add 450 and two and come up with 452 and now that means the whole election was a failure.’ Well, that’s ridiculous.”

Others were more realistic after being idealistic.  Election judge Scott Netherland thought he nailed the count on the night of the election, having counted 152 ballots, but saw the next morning that his final count did not add up.  “We took something that worked and now broke it,” the precinct election official said. “We failed to guard the purity of the election with this hand count. What we just did is evidence that this hand count was not accurate.”  Yeah, so we said.